


Haul Away Bro

by scribefindegil



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Banter, Fluff, Gen, Just dorks being dorks, Post-Canon, Singing, Terrible Jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 13:23:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8802496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribefindegil/pseuds/scribefindegil
Summary: Stan and Ford are stuck in a hole inside a crashed alien spaceship. To be fair, this is pretty par for the course.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for garrulousgibberish as a Fluffstravaganza commission! Their prompt was "sea shanties." Hope I did it justice!
> 
> Also most of the jokes were outsourced to thesnadger because I don't have whatever brain setting makes it easy to come up with puns.

 

“Well,” said Stan. “That didn’t work.”

Beside him, Ford groaned and rolled over onto his back.

“Brilliant observation, Stanley,” he grumbled. “Truly enlightening.”

Stan shrugged. “Nah, if it was enlightening we’d be able to see better.”

He couldn’t see his brother’s expression in the dark, but the tenor of the groaning beside him changed.

“Besides, you’re the one who’s always going on about the importance of negative results.”

“Ah, yes,” said Ford. “Scientific query: Can we get out of this hole? Preliminary results: No. I’m sure all the big journals are just dying to read the abstract.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Stan, grinning preemptively. “A research paper about holes sounds pretty . . . _deep_ to me!”

Ford let out another groan. “I can’t believe I’m stuck down here in the dark while you pun me to death.”

“You’re right. You’re right. This is a serious situation.”

“Thank you.” There was a rustling of fabric and then a soft blue light bloomed over them. Stan wasn’t sure which nerd gizmo Ford was using this time; they’d smashed their lantern the third time they’d tried to climb out.

“It isn’t a time for . . . sar-chasm.”

Stan laughed at his own joke. He laughed louder when Ford flopped his head back dejectedly and hid his face in his six-fingered hands.

“You’re terrible.”

“Hey,” said Stan, pulling himself into a sitting position on the impossibly slick floor. “First, I’m insulted. Those are some quality puns. Second, don’t you mean abyss-mal?”

“I . . .” Ford’s mouth hung open for a moment. “Abysmal? Do you even know . . . Is this why you started asking me to explain myself when I used words that weren’t in your vocabulary? So you can co-opt them into your lowbrow humor?”

Stan grinned wickedly. “I have no clue what you’re talking about, bro! It’s not like those fancy nerd words are _pun-damental_ to—”

Ford flipped a switch on his sci-fi nerd gun and started firing up at the dome high above them. Stan flinched at the brightness—and, okay, maybe a little bit at the whole “blasts of fiery blue energy” thing. Why couldn’t Ford have a nice normal gun? Sure, the glow-in-the-dark setting was nice, but the thing was more trouble than it was worth. Thing _s_ , he supposed. Ford had lost at least three Space Guns to anomalies and one to a pair of angry swans, but he just kept producing more of them. Stan was almost tempted to ask if he had some extra-dimensional armory hidden away somewhere, but he was a little afraid of the answer.

“I, uh, thought you said that wasn’t doing any good,” said Stan.

Ford kept firing. “It’s possible that it’s doing incremental damage.”

“. . . And then either there’s a tiny hole that we can’t reach or the whole thing falls down on us and we end up like Mr. Bug-Eyes out there.”

To Stan’s relief, Ford lowered the gun and flicked it back to whatever setting made the whole thing glow like those plastic stars Mabel was always sticking to the ceiling.

“I admit that I find myself . . . stymied,” said Ford with a sigh.

“Eh.” Stan shrugged. “We’ve been in worse scrapes.”

Ford chuckled and turned his head to look at his brother. “True. But for us that’s a low bar.”

“I meant worse scrapes where ours were the only butts on the line.”

“So did I.”

Stan considered some of the situations they’d found themselves in over the past year.

“. . . Fair. But hey, if we’re stuck down here, at least we got each other. Just you, me, and the joke book!”

It wasn’t the original joke book. That was sitting safe on a shelf in the Mystery Shack, where Soos regarded it with a healthy mix of reverence and apprehension. But Mabel had taken to sending thin little paperback volumes in her care packages, especially the ones that she knew she’d get to watch them open. The look of glee on her face whenever she saw Ford sigh and hand the book over to Stan had probably added years to his life.

Ford sat up. “Nope,” he said. “Not happening. Time to escape.”

Stan laughed and hauled himself upright. Sometimes Ford’s reactions to the threat of jokes were even better than his reactions to the jokes themselves.

“Good plan. But, uh, what is the plan exactly?”

Ford raised his gun high overhead like a torch and looked around them at the ever-changing rows of shiny scale-like stairs that circled the cavern.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted, sounding as grumpy as he did every time he had to admit he didn’t know something. “As we’ve established, brute force isn’t the answer. They’re not magnetic—nothing in this ship is made of metal, as far as I can tell, at least not a ferrous one—and the architecture can throw off both humans and grappling lines with ease. The blasted thing is _trying_ to trap us down here, and so far it’s done an admirable job.”

“Hmm.” Stan rested a foot on the first stair. Almost immediately it folded back into the wall with a smug-sounding swish. They’d made it maybe ten feet up or so on their last attempt. A record. “So these are definitely different bug-eyed aliens than the bug-eyed aliens that you’re used to?”

Ford stalked around the walls, examining them closely in the light of his glowstick gun. Stan wasn’t surprised when he didn’t find anything. He must have checked a dozen times already.

“Yes,” he said. “Quite different. Assuming that body we found in the glacier was representative, and judging from the size and layout of the ship, I’d say they were an insectoid race whose ships function as floating hives. It would be quite fascinating if we hadn’t triggered the defense system and been tossed down here.”

“Question,” said Stan, prodding the wall in case it suddenly decided it wanted to let them out. “Have you ever explored an abandoned spaceship _without_ triggering the defense system? I don’t know, something like ‘Crash Site Gamma: flying saucer full of aliens who only care about tea parties and don’t try to kill you at all’?”

“Well, no,” said Ford. “Where’s the fun in that? But if it makes you feel better we can save the Crash Site Gamma designation for when we do find a harmless vessel. It’s sure to happen eventually.”

He started tapping at the walls, frowning in concentration. He’d already tried shooting them, but even though the paneling around them had to be quite thin to allow the stairs to function it was impervious to the blasts. Stan knocked at his own section of wall. There was no echo.

“Hang on—how come there’s a Crash Site Omega if there isn’t already a Crash Site Gamma? I’m no smartypants like you but I did learn that stupid alphabet.”

“Yes . . . well . . . it wasn’t exactly a sequential naming sequence . . .” Ford muttered.

Stan paused. “Wait . . . you just called it that because you thought it was cool, didn’t you?”

Ford didn’t answer.

“You’re such a _nerd_!”

Ford pretended to ignore him. Stan laughed. It was easy to laugh these days, even when they were being menaced by mer-creatures or stuck inside an inescapable doom pit. Ford liked to pretend that science was serious and important and he got so flustered whenever Stan pointed out that half of it was just making things up. And the names . . . either they were some inside nerd joke or ripped off from an old sci-fi adventure story. Or both.

Ford shot Stan a look that was probably supposed to be grumpy, but he couldn’t hide the hint of a smile playing around the corners of his mouth.

“What are we gonna call this one?” Stan asked. “Is there a cool word for ‘alien dungeon pit’?”

“Crash Site Oubliette, perhaps?” said Ford. “Strictly speaking, the scale prevents it from being a bottle dungeon . . .”

“Could be a keg dungeon,” said Stan. “Big and full of bad decisions.”

“I had no way of knowing the floor would give out under us like that!” Ford protested. “I was expecting guard drones, not prat falls!”

“Maybe it’s just a fan of quality comedy,” said Stan. “I’d better try some more jokes just to make sure.”

Ford sighed. “Spare me.”

“Not on your life. Hey Ford—what do you call an alien that’s cooking bacon?”

Ford had gone back to tapping on the wall. “I don’t care.”

“C’mon, you’ve gotta do it right! Otherwise it’s one of those whatchamacallums—‘failed trials’—and I’ll have to try again.”

The sigh was really impressive this time. “Fine, Stanley. What _do_ you call an alien that’s cooking bacon?”

Stan paused to really savor the moment.

“An Unidentified Frying Object!”

Ford did a pretty good job of not reacting. He gave a tiny shake of his head and stared down at the floor like he was hoping it would open up to another level of alien dungeon and eat him.

Stan cackled until he was out of breath and half-collapsed against the wall. He slapped the smooth surface as he pulled himself back up and went to wipe the tears of laughter from his eyes.

The wall flashed.

Stan froze and looked up at Ford, who was staring at him with big owlish eyes.

“Um.”

Ford scampered over to him and stared at the wall next to his hand.

“Do that again.”

“Okay. What do you call a—”

“No, no. Hitting the wall!”

Again, Stan smacked the surface. Nothing happened.

Ford frowned. “Keep trying. Let me just . . .”

He backed away around the curve of the pit’s wall. Stan continued to rhythmically hit the wall. Nothing continued to happen.

Then Ford tapped the wall next to him at the same time that Stan landed one of his hits, and the whole thing lit up. Stan couldn’t describe the color—it looked like something you should only be able to see after you’d eaten fermented sprinkles, and if he stared at it too hard his head ached.

The light winked out as quickly as it had come.

“Well,” said Stan.

“Fascinating!” said Ford. He reached his hands as far apart as he could and knocked with both of them at the same time. The light didn’t return. But when he gestured to Stan and the two of them rapped on the wall in time with each other, the areas around them began to glow.

“Some method of communicating with the ship, perhaps?” Ford mused. “These beings’ range of motion was probably limited, but they might have used their antennae . . .”

“So you’re saying we’ve gotta convince the ship we’re a pair of bug-eyed aliens?” Stan asked.

“More or less.”

The color of the light changed to something equally eye-searing but with more of a blue base, and one of the scalelike staircases extended itself in front of Stan’s feet. He placed a tentative foot on the first step, but this time it held.

It held just long enough for him to let out an excited whoop and leap for the next one before the light blinked out, the stairs folded themselves back into the wall, and Stan crashed onto the floor for the sixth time that day. Not that he was counting.

“I think we have to keep knocking,” said Ford.

“Really?” Stan grumbled. “You think?”

After several more attempts they learned that they needed to knock—and step—in perfect unison, or the ship would have another hissy fit and toss them back into the dungeon. Stan wasn’t sure how many more attempts they could make—his whole body felt like one big bruise, and Ford couldn’t be doing much better.

They were lying on their backs on opposite sides on the dungeon, staring up at the opening far overhead and trying to synchronize their knocking.

“Sorry I’m no good at pretending to be in a bug army,” said Stan, as once again they got just far enough out of synch that the lights went out.

“’Sokay,” said Ford. He’d cracked his head on the floor during one of their early attempts and was making an alarming amount of sense. If— _when_ they made it out, Stan was going to have to make sure he hadn’t given himself a concussion. “I think this bug army probably had a shared consciousness. A lot of them do, y’know.”

“I, uh, didn’t know that actually.”

“Oh yeah, very fashionable. Not fashionable. Useful. Keep your brain power centralized and your bodies expendable.”

He stopped knocking on the wall long enough to rub his head. “I could do with an expendable body right now . . .”

“Well tough luck,” said Stan. “We’re stuck with these ones, and if we want to keep them we probably shouldn’t head up there again until we have a better idea of how not to fall down.”

“We just need to work together . . .” said Ford.

They lay in silence for a while. Stan was getting pretty good at staying in rhythm. Then again, keeping time while lying on the floor was a lot easier than trying to do it while moving, especially because the ways the stairs were laid out meant that he couldn’t even see his brother half the time.

The light went out again. This was going to take a while.

“Stanley!”

Stan nearly swallowed his tongue when Ford clapped a hand to his shoulder.

“Sweet Moses, Ford, you’re gonna give me a heart attack!”

Ford had a wide, mad grin on his face. It reminded Stan of bad taxidermy.

“Stanley, I’ve got it! I need you to sing with me!”

“You what now?” Stan stood up, trying to look into his brother’s eyes. “How hard did you hit your head again?”

Ford pushed him off, flapping his hands excitedly as he spun around in a circle.

“My head’s fine! Better than fine! I know exactly—our problem was inconsistent rhythm, but there’s an entire genre designed for synchronizing workers! It’s so simple! I was such a fool for—no, no, I know we’ve talked about not catastrophizing—I wasn’t a fool but still, it’s so simple now that I’ve realized it! Isn’t that the way with so many challenges, though? The solution seems impossible until you figure it out and then it’s the clearest thing in the world, like those pictures that are just dots until you see the hidden owl and then you can’t go back to seeing dots again—”

“Ford!” Stan cut him off. Ford could go on like this for hours if you let him. “What did you realize?”

Ford grabbed his shoulders and grinned widely.

“That we need to sing sea shanties!” he said.

That was definitely not what Stan had been expecting.

“We need to what?”

“Sing sea—”

“Yeah, I heard you, but . . . why?”

Ford released his brother’s shoulders and took a deep breath. He looked a little calmer but he was still jiggling his hands up and down, full of that whole-body energy that took him over whenever he solved a problem.

“We’ll need a short verse . . .” he muttered. “This is more of a heaving action . . .”

“Ford!”

“Yes, yes, sorry. I don’t know how familiar you are with the history of the sea shanty—”

“Not at all,” Stan clarified.

“Ah. Well! Originally they were work songs used on vessels to synchronize labor—generally of two types, the hauling shanties included periods of rest culminating in one or two pulls per chorus, while the heaving shanties were designed to set a steady pace for ongoing tasks such as raising the anchor.”

“And?”

“And! That’s exactly what we need! We’ve, um, established that we can’t maintain a steady rhythm on our own, but I think if we find the right kind of shanty . . .”

“You really think we can . . . sing our way out of this mess?” Stan asked.

“Well, why not? You’ve done it before!”

Stan raised his hands in front of him. “Hey! That was _one time_ , and it was zombies, and it _had_ to be singing so it doesn’t count!”

Ford shrugged. “I mean . . . if you have a better idea, I’m all ears! Not literally. That would be the natives of Dimension 87&. Interesting place. Anyway. I’m a normal human percentage of ears, but they’re willing to listen to any other plans you have!”

Stan squirmed. This idea was stupid. Massively so. But however hard he tried he couldn’t come up with a better one.

*

“It’s not supposed to be _accurate_ , Stanley!”

Stan folded his arms and glared across the dungeon floor at his brother.

“I’m just saying! Neither of us is named ‘Joe’ so this song isn’t gonna make a whole lotta sense!”

Ford rubbed at his temples. “That’s not—I . . . never mind. Sing whatever you like; the words aren’t the important variable here. Just keep in time.”

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, which he seemed to do whenever he sang. Stan didn’t understand why; it wasn’t like Ford had a voice people wanted to hide from. Unlike the rest of the family, he actually sounded _good_.

“Oh, when I was a little lad my mother always told me,” Ford sang. He opened his eyes and indicated to Stan that he should join in on the refrain.

“Way, haul away, we’ll haul away Joe!”

They stepped in time to the beat, circling around the dungeon with one hand tapping the rhythm on the wall.

“That if I did not kiss the girls my lips would grow all moldy!”

Stan did honestly try not to laugh. It didn’t work.

“What?” Ford demanded, as Stan gave up halfway through the next refrain and leaned back against the wall, peals of laughter spilling out from behind the hand he had clapped over his mouth.

“Moldy lips?” Stan managed between giggles. “ _You_? Singing about . . .”

“It’s a folk song!” Ford snapped. “It’s not intended to be autobiographical!”

“Yeah, but . . .” Stan had to stop for a moment and cough, smacking at his own chest. “Look, there’s suspension of disbelief and then there’s _that_.”

Ford went crimson. “I admit that I don’t find the traditional lyrics particularly relatable. Fine. We’ll try again. Just . . . give me a moment.”

He paused and breathed in, his brow furrowed like he was trying to solve one of those math problems with all the letters in them. Then he straightened up, grinned at Stan, and nodded.

“All right! Shall we?”

They started walking again, Ford humming the melody to set the pace.

“Oh when I was a little lad, my _brother_ always told me.”

Well, that was different. Stan joined in. “Way, haul away, we’ll haul away Joe!”

Ford had changed something about that line too. Stan had a suspicion, but he wasn’t quite sure he’d heard properly.

“That if I kept it in a book my nose would grow all moldy!”

“Ha!” Stan barked, and he was quiet enough on the next refrain to clearly hear Ford singing, “Way, haul away, we’ll haul away bro!”

“You’re such a nerd!” he yelled across the dungeon, grinning. Ford shrugged and grinned back and kept singing. They’d circled around to where the stairs began (well, where they began at the moment. Darn things couldn’t make up their minds.) Stan offered up a quick prayer to Paul Bunyan that Ford’s crazy plan would work and they’d actually make it out this time.

“Way, haul away, we’ll haul away together,  
_Way, haul away, we’ll haul away bro!  
_ Way, haul away, we’re bound for better weather,  
_Way, haul away, we’ll haul away bro_!”

Okay, so they were doing normal folk-song things. That was fine with Stan as long as there weren’t any more verses about moldy lips. But then Ford opened his mouth and sang, “Bill Cipher ruled the Nightmare Realm and did his best to spy out!” and Stan was almost too shocked to join in on the next refrain. Almost, but not quite. He rallied and managed to maintain the rhythm. “ _Way, haul away, we’ll haul away bro!_ ”

“But when he tried to take this world, we punched his bloody eye out!” Ford sang with relish.

“Yeah!” Stan shouted before he began the refrain. Ford shot him a sidelong glance and smiled.

They kept climbing. Stan had to admit that it was much easier with the shanty. He didn’t dare look down to see how far they’d come—he might not be terrified of heights anymore, but that didn’t mean he got along with them. He did spare brief glances up. Maybe it was his imagination, but the top of the dungeon looked a little closer.

Ford sang on.

“Oh once I knew a little girl, a fine and frenzied knitter,  
_Way, haul away, we’ll haul away bro!  
_ She’d make you sweaters in your sleep and dunk your head in glitter!  
_Way, haul away, we’ll haul away bro_!”

Oh once I knew a bold young boy whose heart could not be bested  
_Way, haul away, we’ll haul away bro!  
_ Though to be fair, the rest of him was unwashed and unrested!  
_Way, haul away, we’ll haul away bro_!”

Oh once I knew a grand old town with mysteries a-plenty  
_Way, haul away, we’ll haul away bro!  
_ But turns out children solved them better than the cognoscenti  
_Way, haul away, we’ll haul away bro_!”

And then, almost before Stan knew it, the dome of the spaceship opened above them and the pale Arctic sunlight streamed in. Stan was about to leap for the exit, but Ford restrained him. He was still humming.

The ship wasn’t glowing under them anymore, but Stan supposed it didn’t hurt to be careful. Not being careful had been what got them into this mess to begin with.

Ford smiled at him shyly and then looked away, reaching up over the edge of the dome.

“I spent too many years alone and terrified of failing,” he sang.

Stan hauled—ha!—himself up on the strange ridged structure of the dome.

“ _Way, haul away,_ ” they sang together, “ _We’ll haul away, bro!_ ”

“But now I’ve got my brother and a boat to go a-sailing!”

Stan toppled out into the snow, and a second later he heard Ford hit the ground beside him. They lay on their backs with their arms outflung, not quite touching, staring up at the sky. The last refrain was harder to hear without the walls of the spaceship shutting them in, but they sang it anyway, as loud and carefree as Mabel with a karaoke machine.

“ _Way, haul away, we’ll haul away bro!_ ”


End file.
